McCoy Tyner

Alfred McCoy Tyner was born on 11 December 1938 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, the eldest of three children of Beatrice Stevenson Tyner and her husband. His mother, who kept a piano in her beauty salon and urged him toward music, set his course early; at thirteen he began formal study at the Granoff School of Music. In a neighborhood alive with jazz — the pianists Bud and Richie Powell lived close by — Tyner absorbed the language of the music that would define his life. In his teens he embraced the Ahmadiyya faith and took the name Suleiman Saud, though he continued to perform as McCoy Tyner.

He met John Coltrane in 1955, and the bond between them became like kinship. After early work with the Benny Golson–Art Farmer Jazztet, Tyner joined the John Coltrane Quartet in 1960, remaining its pianist through 1965 alongside drummer Elvin Jones and bassist Jimmy Garrison. On landmark recordings such as My Favorite Things and A Love Supreme, his thunderous left-hand fifths, modal voicings, and cascading runs became one of the most imitated sounds in all of jazz.

Leaving Coltrane in 1965, Tyner built a towering career of his own. The Real McCoy (1967) announced his stature as a leader, and a run of albums for Milestone — beginning with Sahara in 1972 — carried his powerful, orchestral conception across the decade and beyond. He gathered ensembles ranging from intimate trios to a working sextet, touring the world for the rest of his life.

An NEA Jazz Master and five-time Grammy winner, McCoy Tyner died on 6 March 2020 in Bergenfield, New Jersey, at eighty-one. His younger brother, Jarvis Tyner, became a prominent political figure — but McCoy's own monument is sound itself. May the great river of his music carry his name onward, undimmed.